For over 40 years we’ve helped people in organizations perform better together.

“If you want to see someone in real pain, watch someone who knows who they are and defaults on it on a regular basis.”

– Pat Murray, management consultant

Candor is the way in which we express who we really are. But as Murray notes we often default on it. When we do, the consequences can create discord within us and in the relationships important to our success.

Part of the problem is that candor means different things to different people. Many of us think of candor as “telling it like it is,” and “callin’ ‘em like we see ‘em.” But the word candor comes from Latin, meaning “to shine.” That’s what real candor is about—allowing both you and those around you to shine by speaking and listening, openly and genuinely. That’s not always so easy as the “candor continuum” graphic illustrates. Continue reading →

Feedback about our behavior is all around us. We step on the scale and we get feedback about how much we weigh and, indirectly, about behaviors that cause our weight to go up or down. We don’t always like the feedback we get but we don’t argue with it. Even if the scale is off by a couple of pounds, we accept what it tells us.

With people, we’re far less accepting. We treat feedback we don’t like as criticism. True, much of the feedback we receive is unskillfully delivered. But even when feedback is offered with our best interests at heart, we tend to deflect it. In so doing we also dismiss observations about our behavior that can actually help us be more effective in critical areas of our work and lives.

I was recently reminiscing with my brother (a child psychologist by training) about a recent family reunion. It was an innocent conversation until the moment he told me what he thought about how I treated my teenage daughter in a conversation he overheard. Wham. I never saw it coming and I wasn’t happy to hear what he had to say. He moved on, but I couldn’t. In the moment I was emotionally stuck and couldn’t get past my reactions to what he had said.

Once I calmed down I realized there are two ways I generally respond to feedback I don’t like, including my brother’s: Continue reading →

Behavior change is hard. I’ve devoted my professional life to helping people change in ways that improve their life and work and my personal life trying to get better myself. I’ve learned a lot along the way. Tomorrow, January 1st, Resolution Day, is the Super Bowl of behavior change. The day that so many of us vow to do something different or new to more closely align our behavior with our values and goals. I hope the reflections that follow help you be more successful keeping the commitments to yourself that truly matter.

To resolve is to “firmly decide on a course of action.” Often it is to re-solve a problem we’ve tried to solve before. We commit to exercise more, save our money, spend time with our families, quit smoking, lose weight, get organized. These are promises we make to ourselves and sometimes to others that we haven’t kept in the past.

Most New Year’s resolutions are doomed to failure for three reasons:

Making a decision to act is different from action itself. Behavior change doesn’t happen overnight, even when that night is December 31st. It takes time and is a bumpy process.

Resolutions aren’t failure-tolerant. Once we break a promise to ourselves, it’s easy to give up, especially if we haven’t followed through before.

Most resolutions are declarations, not plans. If you want to make a change, you need a plan.

The calendar tells us that the holidays are upon us: Thanksgiving has come and gone, Hanukkah has begun, and Christmas is a few crazy weeks away. Unfortunately, for many, the holiday spirit hasn’t yet arrived in our hearts. You may be feeling the pressure of having too much to do in too little time, deadlines nipping at your heels at work and at home, no time to relax. You may also have mixed feelings as you anticipate the social events of the holidays, both at work and with family. Planning for the year to come might be laced with uncertainty regarding your business and personal life.

That stress can seep into your communication and your relationships. When you’re distracted, you won’t listen as well. When you’re feeling pressure, you’re more likely to overreact to little things. When you are ambivalent or worried but don’t have time to relax, those emotions can dictate how you relate to people. Even if you’re managing these issues well, there will be people at work and home who are on tilt. The great irony of the holidays is that when you are supposed to be giving thanks, praying for peace, and celebrating the greatness of the human spirit, you find yourself gritting your teeth, doing what you can to get through the day.

Here’s the good news: there are two gifts that will help you disrupt this pattern. These gifts create thanksgiving, peace, and connection at this time year and throughout the year, whether you’re in a meeting about 2016 priorities, chatting with a colleague, or celebrating with friends and family around the hearth. The trick is that to get these gifts you first have to give them (sorry).

The first is the gift of your attention. As co-workers, friends, or family members talk, give them your full attention. Look away from whatever screen is at hand; stop the part of your brain that is working out other things. Set your own thoughts and reactions about what they’re saying aside. Be as present as you can with the people you’re with. Years ago, research found that married couples paid this kind of attention to one another on average 20 minutes a week. In an era where partners are as likely to get status updates online as they are in person, true attention is a rare treat.

The second gift is even rarer. It is the gift of listening. When a co-worker or confidante becomes animated or starts speaking about something important to them, don’t respond right away. Be curious. Don’t interrupt. Wait to see if there’s more. Try to understand the issue from their frame of reference, not yours. After they’ve talked a while, summarize what you’ve heard. Show you understand what they’re saying and why it’s important to them. Then share your perspective—and be ready to listen some more.

A by-product of these gifts of attention and listening is that, when you do them well, they give back. When you genuinely pay attention, you find a moment of stillness within your own hectic day. When you listen to someone else’s challenges, it puts your own in perspective. And when you listen attentively to others, they’re far more likely to listen to you.

These gifts enrich your relationships too, building trust and connection. Paying attention and listening help other people let go of distractions and return to the present moment where it becomes truly possible to give thanks, find peace, and celebrate the spirit of the season.

Happy Holidays from Ridge!

Jim

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You’ve heard the saying, “those that can’t do, teach.” In the corporate world they say the same thing about trainers. “They” aren’t necessarily wrong; there’s a lot of bad training and bad trainers out there. They’re not necessarily right, either. The best trainers have the ability to lift the performance of an entire organization. Navy SEALs, whose lives literally depend on their performance often quote the Greek poet Archilochus (650 BC): “We do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training.” And the training, more often than not, falls to the level of the trainer.

Trainers are indeed difference-makers when it comes to training outcomes. A beautifully designed workshop delivered by a mediocre trainer will be mediocre. But mediocre training delivered by a great trainer can influence a learner’s performance long after the workshop has ended.

Which begs the question: what qualities do the best trainers exhibit? Clearly all trainers must have the platform skills and the subject matter expertise to be credible with their audiences. But those are table stakes these days.

Ridge has been training trainers for 43 years. In our experience the “secret sauce” that separates great trainers from good trainers includes three qualities that pioneering psychologist Carl Rogers identified as empathy, authenticity, and respect. Simply put, when trainers exhibit empathy, authenticity, and respect (which result in the handy acronym “EAR”) they positively impact their students’ learning and do so in measurable ways.

Business literature (particularly in the US) is filled with calls for workforce candor. Jack Welch devoted an entire chapter to it in his best seller, Winning. Jim Collins encourages business leaders to “confront the brutal facts” to get from Good to Great. Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan talk about the importance of “robust dialogue” in Execution. And for good reason: as Welch points out, when more people get in the conversation, “more ideas get surfaced, discussed, pulled apart, and improved.” This in turn enhances innovation and decision making while simultaneously reducing costs (Welch and Welch, 2005, p. 27).

As with most things that sound too good to be true, there’s more to creating candor than meets the eye. While candor holds great promise as a source of competitive advantage, it’s a rarity in organizational life. Leaders who seek to institutionalize candor find it elusive for three primary reasons:

Candor lives between people, but the decision to practice candor is a personal one. It is a choice to make public some aspect of our private thoughts, feelings, or beliefs. Because the depth and breadth of these revelations can’t be fully known by others unless we tell them—even under duress—candor is an extension of our free will.

Candor in its purest sense is an organic, messy process. Candor bubbles up rather than cascades down which makes it difficult for leaders to mandate candor as a cultural norm in their organizations.

Most managers have an “approach-avoid” attitude toward candor. While they say they want it, most don’t want the conflict, frustration, and additional work they’ve experienced as by-products of candor. While a skilled leader (or outside facilitator) is able to manage the dynamics for productive ends, for most leaders, inviting candor can feel like opening Pandora’s Box.

Are You An MbA?

What kind of problems keep you awake at night? We’ve asked this question of thousands of managers who have participated in our workshops. After giving them a minute to make their list, we ask them to put a “P” by the problem if it’s a people problem and a “T” by the problem if it’s a task problem. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that over the years, the people problems outweigh the task problems by at least two-to-one, often more. Make your own list and see if this is true for you.

We ask managers another question in our workshops: why don’t people do what you want them to do? In less than a minute virtually every group creates a list that includes the following:

Not enough time

Other priorities

Forgot

They don’t want to

They don’t know how to

Etc.

When we’re done brainstorming the list, we ask managers what percentage of these issues they have the ability not to control but to influence. We consistently get agreement that managers can influence between 60 and 100 percent. When it comes to managing underperformers, this is an important realization: you’ve likely got more influence than you’re currently using.

There’s more to great coaching than meets the eye. We see premier sports coaches yelling, pacing the sidelines, or looking silently but intently at a game. We see them sitting with their skating or gymnastic protégé awaiting the scoring at the Olympics. What we don’t see is the behind-the-scenes work, the actual coaching, that has led up to the moments that we do see. That’s why I love Ronald Fried’s book, Corner Men: Great Boxing Trainers. It gives us a window to the behind-the-scenes coaching that made boxing’s great champions.

Here’s what the Joe Louis, the heavyweight champion for twelve consecutive years (1937-1949), said about his coach:

“All that I am as a fighter, a champion, I owe to Jack Blackburn. He was teacher, father, brother, nurse, best pal to me… I won’t forget his confidence in my corner… He never scolded. He spoke so plain like. He was easy to understand because he had a way of showing you your mistakes in his simple way… He didn’t rush me. He didn’t scold me. He didn’t point out my mistakes like a showoff in front of the crowd. So he went downstairs away from them and he put the gloves on with me. That was real teaching.”

What Joe Louis describes rings true even for the coaching that happens at work. It’s the coaching relationship, the coach’s mindset, and the coach’s skills and strategies that creates champions. Consider the following questions, gleaned from boxing’s great corner men, to see where you standout and where you might improve as a coach.

I was excited to see an email from the Gallup Business Journal with this headline hit my inbox recently. Awesome topic! Since Gallup has done so much research on employee engagement, I couldn’t wait to see their analysis and recommendations for managers to get better that this fundamental part of their jobs.

My excitement didn’t last long. Gallup’s list, it turns out, was a series of high-level platitudes:

Clarify the organization’s purpose and brand.

Remove cultural barriers to performance (executive team misalignment, lack of commitment to change, lack of role clarity, inconsistency in strategy execution …)

Study [high performers]… to ensure that strategies for selecting and developing employees are on target.

Use predictive analytics to hire for excellence.

Align people and processes.

That’s a fine list for top executives crafting an organization’s future. And sure, those things could improve performance management in indirect ways. But what I wanted was insight about helping actual managers get better at managing performance now.

My disappointment in Gallup’s article led me to wonder, “what would be on my list if I wrote an article with that title?” What could help managers do a better job at performance management? Here are four suggestions for your consideration.

When it comes to organizational success, every interaction between people is for better or worse. The effects are cumulative. If they aren’t getting better they probably are getting worse.

Ridge’s training is built on the four following principles or “rules” to make sure interactions and important relationships are consistently and intentionally getting better so they yield better results.

Rule One: Communicate with purpose.

Most people think they know what they want to get out of an interaction, but they’re casual about it. You may think that all you need to do is tell people about a new policy, procedure, task, or deadline—but what do you want people to do as a result? Do you want them to change in some way? Do they need to be bought in? Do they have competing priorities that need to be addressed? Being intentional about your purpose up front will inform your communication strategy and reduce the toll needless friction takes on your time, results, and relationships.

Rule Two: Tune into tension.

Unmanaged tension kills productivity and the relationships crucial to your success. Don’t wait until arguments break out to manage it. People are always sending us signals about how they’re receiving what we’re saying–in their tone and body language as well as in their words. By keeping your radar up you can keep the dynamics between you and others positive which in turn yield better outcomes and more effective relationships, now and in the future.

Rule Three: Listen early and often.

Listening truly is the master skill of effective communication. It transforms misunderstanding, conveys empathy, and is an expression of respect and positive regard for the speaker–even in the midst of tension or conflict. Unfortunately listening isn’t as easy or common as most people think. We may think we’re listening but more often than not others don’t experience us that way. Few people in our work or home lives feel listened to enough. Do you? Great listening is an ongoing practice, not an occasional event. Cultivating this practice and closing the listening gap is key to getting the best from your working relationships with others.

Rule Four: Speak so people can learn.

When you speak, do you think about how others will receive what you say? Probably not: most people speak from their own frames of reference rather than speak to the recipient’s. If your words seem to fall on deaf ears, that may be why. To get better results, speak so people can learn. Tell employees how the feedback you’re giving will improve their success. Explain to customers the rationale for a specific policy. Be genuine, even if it is the company line. What you need to say may not always be up to you. How you say it is.

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